Cerulean Salt

Don Giovanni; 2013

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Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. On the surface, it was a modest record-- 11 lo-fi acoustic songs written and recorded in the span of a week while snowed in at her parents' neighborless Alabama home near the body of water from which the project takes its name. Chronicling missed connections and cell phones smashed in moments of frustration, it was an album-length meditation on the modern allure of going off the grid (the first song was called "Catfish", but it wasn't about that). But what gutted you was a voice that cut through the murk like infomercial shower cleaner. Crutchfield sang frankly ("I think I love you, but you'll never find out") and without inhibition, as if she desperately wanted but didn't expect to be heard.

Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's new album, is going to be heard. But from its opening moments, you get the sense that she's ready for it, the newfound assurance, steadiness, and clarity of her voice immediately obvious. "We are late, we are loud, we remain connected as you're reading out loud," she sings on the smolderingly evocative opener, "Hollow Bedroom". Like American Weekend, it begins with just a guitar and a voice, though this time the instrument's plugged in and the recording sounds more professional. (It was still recorded at home, this time in the Philadelphia house she shares with her sister and bandmates.) But it's no less intimate-- if anything, the clean recording only brings you in tighter. Crutchfield's voice rises to be heard over the distortion that kicks in during the song's final minute. "And I don't believe that I care at all," she sings with quiet defiance. "What they hear through these walls."

Since her early teens, Crutchfield has been a precocious, prolific songwriter, and now that she's in her early 20s, she's already a veteran of a number of short-lived projects: an early solo act called King Everything, plus a few melodic punk bands she played in with her twin sister, Swearin' frontwoman Allison, including Bad Banana, the Ackleys, and P.S. Eliot. Crutchfield hails from Alabama-- a fact that's stamped all over her voice's twangy swagger-- but her songs have a drifter's perspective that suggest that, in a sense, she's also come from everywhere. Her music is partially about being young and on the road, what happens in those rare cases when teenage wanderlust is not a suburban daydream, but an everyday reality.

Cerulean Salt is full of vagrant wisdom and people who might once have hitchhiked across the country but were born into a moment when they could just join a punk band instead. They crash on shitty group house floors, cram their gear and bodies into vans with questionable, unexplained "blood on the back seat," and shirk from commitment whenever feelings are anything more than fleeting. "I'll try to embrace the lows," she sings on "Coast to Coast", a song whose buoyant static makes the most of her new band members (Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer from Swearin' add bass and drums).

Crutchfield has a way of delivering a line so casually that it takes a half-dozen listens to fully realize how devastating it is. "I had a dream last night, we had hit separate bottoms," she sings, a brilliant, crushing line hidden in the middle of the gently strummed "Lively". Her songs paint scenes in quick, deft strokes thanks to her knack for knowing exactly which physical details will carry emotional resonance. There's something almost unbearably poignant about the wedding reception she describes where "make-up sets on [the bride's] face like tar" and "the champagne flutes poorly engineered, employ dixie cups and jars."

Marriage, tradition, and lineage are all sources of great anxiety in a Waxahatchee song. There was a track on American Weekend about a grandmother, with the repeated refrain, "You got married when you were 15," uttered with disbelief, as though Crutchfield were trying to imagine how different her own life would be had the same been true for her. These themes are explored in more depth on Cerulean Salt; in "Swan Dive" she confesses that "dreams about loveless marriage and regret" keep her up at night, while she presents a peer's wedding as more of a "tragic epilogue" than a celebration on "Dixie Cups and Jars" (which feels like a slightly more harrowing take on Built to Spill's "Twin Falls"). "You’ll remain," she says to her, "I will find a way to leave gracefully, or I'll escape." Where she'll go isn't clear, but it's these free-floating desires and unanswered questions that give Crutchfield's songs their haunting power.

"This place is vile, and I'm vile too," Crutchfield howls on the stunning closer, "You're Damaged". In the hands of a lesser singer, a line like that might feel too exposed. But Crutchfield's characters can't help but be exactly who they say they are: they're catfish in a Catfish world. And as they squirm, flop, and clumsily make their way through their lives, their specific experiences become something universal. "For me, the only way to write lyrics is not to think about other people at all," Crutchfield said in a recent interview. "You just have to write stuff for you and only you, and not worry about how people are going to take it. It'll be inevitably relatable because it's true to you." It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes-- the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.